Tam District Family Newsletter
November 2019
Gratitude
I would like to give a special Thank You to our school parent organizations for your ongoing support, without which we would not be able to provide our students the high quality experiences we do now. This year, the TUHSD School Foundations and Boosters contributed $374,000 directly to support instructional coaches, athletic trainers and graduation costs.
PSPS follow up
The PSPS scheduled for Thursday, November 21st has been canceled for Marin County. All TUHSD schools will be open on Thursday, November 21st and Friday, November 22nd.
We understand how disruptive PG&E's public safety power shutoff (PSPS) in late October was for our community. Maintaining continuity of instruction is always best practice, therefore we strive to keep schools open whenever it is safe to do so. During the most recent PSPS, we worked closely with the Marin County Office of Education, other superintendents in the county and the Marin County Office of Emergency Services. We made decisions using the best information available to us at the time.
As a district, we will be submitting a waiver for the school days missed due to the PSPS. California Department of Education (CDE) requires 180 student days and in order to waive any of those days, we have to demonstrate the circumstances that caused us to close our schools were beyond our control. The CDE has indicated they will likely grant waivers for school days missed due to PSPS events in this current year. However, they have made is clear that school districts should build emergency days into the calendar, such as some school districts that live in areas in which it snows do. We will be looking into what this might look like for next year and should we add any additional days to the calendar, via board approval of a new calendar, we will communicate that out as soon as possible. At this point, we do not anticipate having to add days to our current year calendar.
Some folks have asked why we needed power in order to open the schools. The short answer is to ensure student safety. Without power, our bathrooms and locker rooms are dark as they do not have sources of natural light and our fire suppression systems may become unreliable in a sustained outage. For each of our large school campuses, we are not ADA compliant without power and we cannot serve food, which we are required to do. In the event of a partial power outage, such as we had at Tam, we may be able to do a workaround by moving classes to buildings that have power and preparing food at Redwood and transporting it to the Tam campus. But when an entire campus is without power, we are not able to ensure student safety or comply with state and federal regulations for ADA and school nutrition.
Unfortunately, we are likely to face PSPS events in the future. As a District, we will continue to refine our protocols and do all we can to communicate effectively and as frequently as necessary. This is new territory for all of us and we will continue to learn and improve as we go. We also want to acknowledge that for some of our families it may be a hardship to miss work in order to be home with children during school closures. Our primary goal remains to provide our regular educational activities in a safe environment with as much continuity as possible. To this end, we will be looking into ways of keeping schools open during future power shut offs, but we are not yet able to do that. We will keep schools open when it is safe to do so.
Tam District Fall Sports Wrap Up
Redwood Football
Drake Girls Waterpolo
Tam Girls Volleyball
Drake High
Girls Water Polo- MCAL Champions
Girls Water Polo- NCS Champions
Boys Water Polo- MCAL Champions
Boys Cross Country- MCAL Champions
Tam High
Girls Tennis: MCAL Champions
Girls Tennis: NCS D1 Champions
Girls Water Polo: NCS D2 Champions
Girls Volleyball: Nor Cal D4 Runner up
Teams still participating: Girls Tennis, Girls Water Polo, Co-ed Cross Country
Redwood High:
Girls Freshman Volleyball- MCAL Champions
Girls Varsity Cross Country- MCAL Champions
Varsity Football- MCAL Champions
Hudson Grace- Boys Cross Country 1st Place
Redwood Girls XCountry
Redwood Girls Field Hockey
Drake Boys XCounty
Tam Girls Tennis
Tam Girls Waterpolo
Drake Boys Waterpolo
Teen Wellness Film Series
March 3, 2020 – Teen Wellness Film Series – Not Alone at the Smith Rafael Film Center at 7:00pm. Screening + Panel Discussion. Presented by CFI Education and TUHSD Wellness - Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente
- April 21, 2020 - Teen Wellness Film Series – Film TBA at the Smith Rafael Film Center at 7:00pm. Screening + Panel Discussion. Presented by CFI Education and TUHSD Wellness - Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente
For ticket information, please click here.
Budget Update
Family Resources
Please see more information on fentanyl and how to discuss it with your students below.
Thanksgiving Break
Tam District
Email: ttaupier@tamdistrict.org
Website: tamdistrict.org
Phone: 45-945-1021
Twitter: @TamSupt